Emma Goldman
Anarchist, Feminist & Writer · 1869–1940
Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in the Russian Empire, emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and spent the next four decades as one of the most famous — and most prosecuted — public intellectuals in the country. She lectured constantly, edited her own journal Mother Earth, was repeatedly arrested for advocating birth control and opposing the draft, and was eventually deported to Russia in 1919 by a Justice Department run by a young J. Edgar Hoover.
Her relevance to the long argument about religion is twofold. She was, very plainly, an atheist — but more interestingly, she was one of the first American writers to articulate atheism as a feminist position. Her essays of the 1910s — The Failure of Christianity, The Philosophy of Atheism, and the chapters of Anarchism and Other Essayson marriage and the “traffic in women” — argue that the religious construction of women as wives, mothers, and moral guardians was the structural foundation of their oppression. Strip that scaffolding away, and the entire economic and legal order of female subordination collapses with it.
Religion is incompatible with human dignity
Goldman's case against religion was not primarily metaphysical — it was political and ethical. She argued that the central religious idea, that humans are sinful creatures dependent on a divine master, was structurally identical to the political idea that workers are subjects dependent on a state. Both, she said, taught submission as virtue.
Women's emancipation requires the rejection of religion
She was one of the earliest American writers to argue that the legal subordination of women, the criminalization of contraception, and the sanctification of marriage as property were not separate problems but the same problem — each enforced by clerical authority and incompatible with a free life.
Atheism as a positive project
In The Philosophy of Atheism Goldman explicitly resisted the framing of atheism as mere negation. Her atheism was a commitment to this world, this life, and this set of fellow humans — the only material we actually have to work with.
Free speech is the test of every regime
Goldman was arrested repeatedly for public lectures on birth control, conscription, and atheism. Her experience made her one of the sharpest defenders of free speech in American history — across left and right alike — long before the term was rhetorically fashionable.
Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress. Christianity, in particular, has been the most pernicious of religions.
The Failure of Christianity
Goldman’s 1913 essay is one of the great short anti-clerical documents in English. Written in Greenwich Village while she was being routinely arrested for speaking in public, it makes the case that Christianity’s historical record — its alliances with empire, slavery, war, and the suppression of women — is the relevant evidence against it, and that no amount of theological gloss can wash that record out.
Read alongside her Philosophy of Atheism (1916), it forms one of the clearest early-20th-century statements of what would later be called secular humanism: a refusal to outsource ethics to scripture, and an insistence that human beings make their own meaning in the only life they actually have.
Essential reading
Best quotes
“The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding, and beautifying possibilities.”
“Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom.”
“The most violent element in society is ignorance.”
“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”
“Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion.”
Where to find her work
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